Cedar Rapids Museum of Art showcasing Iowa in 3 new exhibitions

CEDAR RAPIDS — Iowa, in all its splendor, is being splashed all over the walls of the Cedar Rapids Museum of Art with three new exhibitions.

“Mildred Pelzer’s Iowa,“ with its vivid, detailed glimpses of Iowa’s past, is on view on the second floor through Jan. 2.

“Dick Pinney: Jack of All Trades” expands the visual horizons of this late Cedar Rapids artist known best for his elaborate 3D carved wood assemblages. This deep and varied exhibition will occupy two first-floor galleries from Saturday, Oct. 2 to Oct. 30, 2022. It coincides with the 25th anniversary of his death in 1996.

Also opening Saturday is “Five: Five Contemporary Iowa Landscape Artists,” showcasing very different views inspired by the world around Cedar Rapids and Iowa City, through the eyes of local painters Nancy Lindsay, Mike Ryan, Al Sabin, Marcia Wegman and the late Larry Zirbel. This large-scale exhibition continues through Jan. 16 in three first-floor galleries.

New exhibitions

Where: Cedar Rapids Museum of Art, 410 Third Ave. SE, Cedar Rapids

New exhibits: “Mildred Pelzer’s Iowa” on view now through Jan. 2, 2022; “Dick Pinney: Jack of All Trades,” on view Saturday, Oct. 2, to Oct. 30, 2022; “Five: Five Contemporary Iowa Landscape Art” on view Saturday, Oct. 2 to Jan. 16, 2022

Hours: Noon to 4 p.m. Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday, Sunday; noon to 8 p.m. Thursday; 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday

Admission: $8 adults; $7 college students and ages 62 and up; $4 ages 6 to 18; free ages 5 and under; masks required

Information: crma.org/

“Grant Wood Revealed” dominated the first floor through early September, with an eclectic collection of his works on view in five galleries. That was part of the museum’s pre-pandemic plan to devote 2020 to large-scale exhibitions placed in five galleries instead of the usual three.

“And so Grant Wood was the end of those big exhibitions that we’re getting around to towards the end of 2021 now,” Curator Kate Kunau said. “Dick Pinney is our return to normalcy and curatorial practice.”

Pinney exhibit

The museum has 117 pieces by Pinney in its permanent collection, and when Kunau arrived at the museum six years ago, she fielded many phone calls from area residents telling her the museum didn’t have enough Pinney works on view.

“He is a bit of a local favorite,” Kunau said, “so this is our attempt to get more Pinney on view and allow people to really appreciate him and the wide variety of work that he did.”

His framed wood boxes can be seen in private homes and businesses throughout the area and contain carved items personalized for the recipient. The exhibit features two of those — one of which is titled “Tribute to Gary L. Jost.”

The large circular piece displayed next to it is a bit of a mystery, however, with no title or information, Kunau noted.

Carlis Faurot, the museum’s facilities manager, has a photo showing it on display in the early days of the Five Seasons Hotel, which opened in 1979 along First Avenue NE, and now operates as the DoubleTree by Hilton Hotel.

“We’ve had it in our collection for a while, but we can’t find any documentation on it,” Kunau said.

But wood work is not the extent of Pinney’s artistry.

“He really was a polymath and Renaissance man,” Kunau added, as illustrated by the watercolors, landscape paintings, photography and “some really fun paintings and little cartoon sketches that he did,” which are featured in the new exhibition.

“As somebody who only knows him through his art, his watercolors are probably my favorite,” she said. “I think he's a really amazing watercolor painter, which is a difficult medium. Those are my favorite, but certainly in the community, he's known for the wood boxes.”

Pelzer’s Iowa

Mildred Pelzer, who died in 1985 at age 95, studied painting with Grant Wood and Marvin Cone and served as Wood’s publicist.

“She kind of flies under the radar unless you're specifically interested in very precise things,” Kunau said.

Wood’s Regionalist style runs through the murals and art in public spaces for which Pelzer is best known.

Born in Wisconsin in 1889, she moved to Montana at age 2, graduated in 1909, taught for a short time, then went to New York to study. She continued teaching in Indiana and South Dakota, then married Louis Pelzer of Iowa City on New Year’s Day in 1917. She lived in Iowa City from 1917 until 1949, immersing herself in the local arts scene.

Her husband, a history professor at the University of Iowa, became her adviser as she created the massive “Symphony of Iowa” oil painting in 1935, now hanging on its own wall in the museum exhibit. Measuring nearly 7 feet by 10 feet, it traces Iowa history from 1833 to 1933.

It’s full of so much detail — including town names and iconic symbols like a covered bridge for Winterset and tulips for Pella — that museum staff placed a rope in front to keep viewers from touching it.

She also was commissioned in the early 1930s to paint eight murals depicting Iowa history for the Hotel Jefferson, Iowa City’s largest building at the time. Three of those are on view, as well.

“One is significantly darker than the other two,” Kunau said. “We're not sure if this one got discolored through just being up at the Hotel Jefferson at a time when there was just much more smoke in the air or they were stored kind of in a non-ideal situation for a long time after they were taken down.”

The other two were sent to a conservation center after one of them was touched by floodwater in 2008. As a result, their colors are much more vibrant, to the extent that Kunau was torn about displaying the discolored piece alongside them.

“But I think it's a really cool object lesson of like, this is what can happen to paintings,” she said, “but it can be refurbished. And if somebody wants to write me a check to get the other one cleaned, I'm not mad about it.”

The exhibit also features examples of her floral paintings and landscapes. One of her florals, which isn’t in the exhibit, graced the cover of Better Homes and Gardens magazine in July 1934.

But life dealt her cruel blows. She and Louis had two sons, both of whom died in World War II, and Louis died of a heart attack in 1946.

“So in 1949, she actually left Iowa and never returned,” Kunau noted, adding that Pelzer lived and worked in Hawaii, Cuba and Florida, remarried a retired general, and settled in Florida for the rest of her life.

“She got into abstraction later in her life,” Kunau said. “We don't have any examples of that in the show, but she created for a very long time.”

Five

This third new exhibition features five Corridor artists working “in various media and styles, from very representational to very abstract,” Kunau said, “so it's a really cool compilation.”

Unlike the other two fall exhibitions, drawn entirely from the museum’s collection, this one includes about 10 to 12 pieces on loan from each artist, together filling three large galleries, and arranged by seasons.

“We thought that was such a perfect way,” Kunau said, to honor the 175th anniversary of Iowa’s statehood, gained on Dec. 28, 1846.

"We've had Grant Wood up for a long time this year, so we thought a great way to close the year is with local artists — as Grant Wood was — who also paint the Iowa landscape,“ she said. "So we thought it was a great way to close out the anniversary year, and it looks fantastic. It's such a cool show. All of those artists submitted incredibly strong works. …

“We have works from most of those artists in our collection, but wanted more contemporary pieces — what they're working on now,” she said. “I visited each of these artists several times and we worked together to choose which pieces are going to best represent their landscape work, and what they think is museum quality. So it was a nice collaborative effort between myself and the artists.”

To choose the works of Zirbel, who died Dec. 19, 2019, Kunau met with his wife, Ann Carson.

Landscape artistry is a very long tradition, Kunau said.

“Landscape emerged as kind of its own genre, at least in the Western art historical canon, in the 17th century with like Dutch landscapes,” she noted, “and that largely happened because of the schism between the Catholics and Protestants.”

The Protestants didn’t want to display religious images in their homes, so artists cast their eye on capturing still life settings and landscapes.

“The 17th century in the Dutch republic is where it really takes off,” Kunau said. “Grant Wood is really important in this, as well. From the 17th century up until the early 20th century, the only landscapes that were suitable to being painted in the art historical canon was, you had to go to Europe, or barring that, you had to go to the East Coast of the U.S. There were all of these artist colonies on the East Coast and there were lots of people painting the shoals of Nantucket and all of these islands and Maine. …

“But Grant Wood and Marvin Cone were really the people who said, ‘No, we can paint where we are. This landscape is just as deserving of artistic attention as anything on the East Coast or in Europe.’ And that being said, they had certainly been to Europe many times and had painted those landscapes.

“The whole appeal of regionalism is that you should paint what you know where you are. That's another reason why it's an especially fitting exhibition for us to do, because Grant Wood was such a big part of bringing landscape literally home in this case.”

While travelers like to bring back landscapes and photos of the places they’ve visited, Kunau added, the lure of the homeland is strong.

“I think people also have a really strong connection to the areas where they live,” she said, ”and they want to see that highlighted and romanticized and elevated.“

Comments: (319) 368-8508; diana.nollen@thegazette.com